Howdy and welcome, I'm Drew!

Most of what you’ll find here are experiments, prototypes, and context-building work, often driven by real problems I’m thinking about at my then-current workplace.

Some spaces where I maintain some presence:

• BlinkingBoxes.net
  • A deliberately informal space where I write, sketch ideas, and leave rough edges visible on purpose. Keeping it raw helps me fight perfectionism and focus on progress over polish.
  • It’s paradoxical, yet it works :)
• devmem.sh
  • A tech-focused, intentionally playful account. One day it clicked that I’m a Linux nerd and developer in Memphis, and with the explosion of TLDs, buying devmem.sh was too good to pass up.
  • I see it as a low-pressure alias where I can share ideas, jokes, and experiments and maybe grow it into something more over time.
• @[email protected]
  • I enjoy social media, but I’m intentional about where I spend that energy. Mastodon’s open, decentralized model fits me best and the fosstodon community seems to align with my goals for open source and perspectives on the world at large.

Over the years I've been getting more and more into build and deploy systems and observability at large. A lot of my efforts are focused on making change safe, easy, and cheap for engineers in technical organizations. I believe that the key to quality and reliablity is allowing engineers to experiment and fail fast on systems that are as close to prod as possible. Practically everything I do is about building that for myself and other engineers within an organization. I also really love observability systems because, when done correctly, it feels like having both a massive radio telescope and electron microscope to reason about global-scale systems with mind-boggling (well, my mind gets boggled often) complexity. Zooming out and in at-will to see big issues and dive in within seconds just makes me feel like a wizard. It's so cool. And flame graphs on top of well-built tracing is just chef's kiss for global-scale backends. In practice, that’s meant building platforms that let teams ship changes safely multiple times a day, with guardrails that surface failures early and locally rather than globally.

Another thing I'd really like to do is get deeper into contributing to open source. Open source presents lots of problems for organizations, but I've seen it work well when great engineers are given easy access to amazing software. Earlier in my career, I underestimated how valuable open source contribution could be as a forcing function for clear design and collaboration. I’ve since carried those lessons into my work at scale and am intentionally looking to re-engage more directly.

I'm super proud of the fact that I took what I learned at Dropbox and knocked out a few big things at FB before life took some turns there, too. Getting to take all of those experiences and really push hard on it in a nearly-greenfield way to benefit an organziation like ALSAC where the mission fuels cancer research for the hospital has been one of the most amazing opportunities of them all. Stress-testing everything I think I know about my deepest passions is a gift unlike any other. I'm willing to talk about this stuff any time and all the time.

Folks around me in devops and SRE mention often "I'm burned out from just writing yaml all day and I want to do something that feels real and technical." I'd like to offer a response here to those folks.

I’ve heard that sentiment and I do understand it (I think it's more "I want to break free" than "I hate my job and YAML"), but for me YAML is just a compact interface to real systems and real impact. I love the Unix philosophy of tools that do simple things well and can be easily stitched together through reasonable, common interfaces. Let me push my will to millions of machines and running processes through a few lines of text and then I get to go engage with some of the best engineers in the world on the neat parts of these systems and their problems? Yes, please. I like to make my laziness scale such that it looks like I worked really hard but didn't.

I've also never worked at a company that couldn't use one single contribution to a custom module or collection under the hood of the markup. Lift the hood, make the world better, land some impact. I've also found that some of the most self-serving projects I've ever worked on were the most long-lasting and impactful for not just me but other engineers. Those are my favorites.

I've worked with a ton of amazing folks, here are some that have made major impacts on how I think about work, life, and a bit of everything:

• Victor Obiremi
  • we work together on supporting Kafka at ALSAC and I can't say enough good stuff here. A great joy to work with and learning from each other is consistently fun and rewarding. As a platform owner trying to wrangle some sense into so many places at once, having a strong engineer who could ship even faster if we let him is the best.

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Note: I want to put some people on this list but I'd rather do it through a set of PRs and ask folks to consent to their inclusion on this list and what I'm saying about them, so I intend for this to be populated over time.